July 2011
17 posts
1 tag
025
She surveyed the veritable menagerie of dusty skeletons, some on their knees and praying, half-sunken into the stone ground of Asgard, for gods that had not come; others, with hands thrown out as if in attempt to shrug off cobwebs. The empty halls breathed with expectation.
That is disgusting, she said. A brief shiver ruffled the walls as, like a dog chastised, the hall reclaimed its trophies,...
1 tag
024
She sat at the bar, book in one hand and fork in the other, and every once in a while I caught her lips moving, as though ink were too fragile to contain what spilled over into movement and sound. I liked the way she turned the pages, as if there were something sacred in dried paper pulp.
1 tag
023
As the amniotic sac punctured beneath the glass scalpel, the embryo emerged, with a covering finer than the lace of any bridal veil.
1 tag
022
The day fell, roses and light broken over glacial clouds, crisp like panes of ice.
1 tag
021
It was the little motions she made that moved me – like the way, rather than simply press the on/off switch, her thumb slid along the side of her cell phone to wake it. There was a prelude and taper to each gesture, a grace like that I’d only ever found in music.
1 tag
020
At these rare moments her body welcomed the sun’s heat, she knew it presaged the fever that would follow, torch through and burn clean.
1 tag
019
She raised her left hand to steady her right, and the well-worn familiarity of the gesture touched her like a shadow, a mirror. Not of herself, she realized as she trembled sugar into her coffee, but of her father as he used to sit straight-backed, brushing words onto parchment with the dedication of prayer.
1 tag
018
And although he spoke for her, it was her hands that punctuated his voice and her words, her hands that you could not look away from as they translated thought to movement, displaced words out of reason and into passion. Her silence backlit a vitality that eclipsed speech.
“I know what it’s like to feel unequal to the task required of you. To...”
– Walter Bishop, from Fringe: “The Last Sam Weiss” (via unsunglory)
1 tag
017
She ran a fingernail along the crest of the milk carton until it caught in a shallow notch. This was the side she opened. The world her hands knew and described held a different shape from that she had known, and one fit the other like a glove made to another hand.
2 tags
016
She ran her fingers beneath the line, feeling the slight contours of the next, and very haltingly her lips formed the shapes of the letters as she named them. The sounds refused to blur into each other, as though the muscles of her mouth were rusted. It was taxing work.
April 2011
3 posts
March 2011
3 posts
“Books are frozen voices, in the same way that musical scores are frozen music....”
– Margaret Atwood
February 2011
27 posts
lost in translation →
“She began to whisper something in my ear. It’s the strangest thing about poetry...”
– Neil Gaiman
“When you write, you always want to capture the cruel radiance of what is.”
– Walker Evans
“Even in merely reading a fairy tale, we must let go our daylight convictions and...”
– Ursula K. Le Guin
“And I tell you that you should open yourselves to hearing an authentic poet, of...”
– Federica Garcia Lorca, 1934
the obverse
Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes. She has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve. Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag.She’s the one lovingly looking over the...
the girl who reads →
Date a girl who doesn’t read because the girl who reads knows the importance of plot. She can trace out the demarcations of a prologue and the sharp ridges of a climax. She feels them in her skin. The girl who reads will be patient with an intermission and expedite a denouement. But of all things, the girl who reads knows most the ineluctable significance of an end. She is comfortable with them....
“(What are your ghosts like?)
(They are on the insides of the lids of my eyes.)...”
– Jonathan Safran Foer
“By the River Piedra I sat down and wept. There is a legend that everything falls...”
– first lines of By The River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept
What's behind the drive to redefine rape in new... →